Your keyboard should have a http://www./ key.

I don't know. I never have really understood Statistical Mechanics and I have probably not already died in a car accident.

They have remodulated the phase colomators on the prion-antiprion exchange field surrounding the writer's conference room.

I implemented something that I cannot distinguish from this from the summary (have not read the entire thing) in a product called "The Corporate Retriever" around the time DOS 2.11 shipped (I actually ported it to dos 2.11 from RT-11 but the RT-11 version did of the registration scheme)

That would have been around 1984 or 5 I think. So yes, it was "usual" or at least published by way of a software product by around the mid 80s. So certainly by 1991 it was not new. I don't believe I invented the idea either - in any case, it was certainly an idea that would have occured to anybody "versed in the arts" back then. Back then the process was done by phone. You generated your unique id, called us and we have you a hashed key to unlock the functionality derived from your generated key.

Just for amusement, this was done in Australia too. Not that that means this earlier system should have been known to the patentee.

A search I can see since the police are searching where you are going.

But surely to be a seizure implies loss of use.

Not arguing the judge should have allowed the practice. Just wondering about the use of terms.

In England its been illegal to drive in the passing lane when not passing for ever. Not only that but it is culturally accepted (not sure if its actually illegal) that you don't pull out if doing so will impede another driver. As a result, traffic flows much better there than here although its not clear it prevents or delays traffic jams.

Of course, the English drive on the right side of the road (which is to day, the left) so the passing lane is the right hand one.

In Australia I don't think there is a law but at least one person has been booked for "obstructing traffic" when failing to get past in a reasonable manner.

I think SmallTalk introduced duck typing rather than Perl. But anyway, there is a real difference here that is important from a theoretical viewpoint.

If you think about the inheritance tree (in C++ if you like) then all methods are inherited. There are no synthesized attributes. On a general tree, attributes can be both inherited (they flow away from the root) and synthesized (they flow towards the root). These terms were original introduced by Knuth, I think, a long time ago in a context far far away.

In a language like C++ you have to know what type has the synthesized attribute to do a dynamic cast, so you cannot write a routine that will work with any type that has a given (set of) method(s). So you end up forcing all the methods used by some set of classes down into a common ancestor (perhaps, in C++ as pure methods), which is a nightmare or even impossible if the common base class is not in a subsystem you own or can convince someone to change.

One way to handle this in a statically typed language is with interfaces. You define a parameter as supporting an interface. This can be (partially) checked at compile time at the call point and assuming your language allows checking at runtime, never converts a compile time fail into a runtime fail because you would otherwise have had to do a dynamic cast that would itself only fail at run-time.

So does this mean we should be counting mice rather than sheep to get to sleep.

It does have the advantages that more of them fit in the bedroom and people don't look at you funny.

Or so I hope.

So you are arguing that the rights of individuals should be subservient to the interests of the state. This is equivalent to the "tear up the consitution; there are terrorists out there" argument that has prevailed in a lot of places in recent years.

Certainly such systems of government (where the individual is subservient to the state) have existed and still do, and there are those who want to restore them, often but not exclusively in the name of religion. A lot of blood has been shed over the last three centurys to overthrow such governments, and no doubt will be again. Trying to stop things getting to that point by defending the US Constitution against depredation from short term expediencies makes a lot of sense.

I don't follow. Having the info available would increase ridership. How is that in the MTA's interest? Its going to make the trains run slower. How can you expect them to keep schedules if the blasted riders keep getting on and off.

Typing hasn't affected my spelling. I have not been able to spell much longer than I have been using a computer.

The problem with autocorrection is they frequently autocorrect incorrectly and often the "corrected" sentence is less understandable than the mistyped version since the corrected word is no longer recognizable as a mangling of the intended word.

I bet it can't tell the difference between someone watching the TV and someone sleeping in front of the TV.

I bet it can't tell the difference between me, sitting at the kitchen table watching the Football and my wife sitting at the breakfast table with her back turned.

I bet it can't tell that I am reading, not watching.

How does it distinguish a large dog from a small child?

If it uses infra red it can at least distinguish a human from a cardboard cut-out of the Duke of Edinburgh! I have seen award ceremonies have trouble with that one, so I guess that makes it smarter than some humans.

This seems rather like the position musicians are in. For every dollar you spend on a large music download site, the people who run the computers trowser around 82 cents while the creators of the content get around 18. That's a terrible division of the money. The cost of delivery of that content is a few cents; the rest is profit.

We see something similar with TicketMonster; charges are often around a quarter to a third of the total cost of tickets even though the preferred method of delivery is electronic; they even tack on a bit extra for the privelege of printing them on your printer, and they tack on a bunch of advertising while they do it, costing you excess ink.

Content can be delivered electronically cheaply, but its delivery is currently expensive because a handful of companies have cornered the delivery.

This is definitely a model that content providers need to break up, so Murdoch clearly does have some understanding of the way the net works and why it is bad. Unfortunately he does not seem to have worked out how to combat it. His answer that "we don't make hardware" is exactly the wrong answer - he should be leading the effort to either open up Kindle or come up with an open replacement.

My laptop has shock detection on the harddrive and I am almost certain I have had it since before April 2008. Seems like this is prior art.

In any case, devices with cases that cannot be opened undetectably have been with us a long time as have those devices that you stick on the inside of a box to detect rough handling.